Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth (SAFETY)

I've heard it said that the quality of an Italian restaurant is inversely proportional to the size of the pepper grinder the waiter brings to your table. In other words, if the grinder is the size of a telephone pole, you're better off warming up some Chef Boyardee.

I think a corollary of that axiom applies to legislation and the acronym used to name it: The more contrived the acronym, the more dubious the legislation. The SAFETY act is a good example.

If you thought legislative ignorance regarding internet technology had reached an all time low when former Senator Stevens characterized the Internet as a series of tubes, you were wrong. In a move of stunning inanity, some legislators are backing legislation that states, “A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.” You can read about it here, among many other places.

Its sponsors claim that this is needed to protect our children, saying things like, “ While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children”

I won't bother to explain how absurd it is for every WiFi Hotspot administrator to keep track of the transient users of the thousands of DHCP addresses a busy node hands out every day, or even how such a scheme would be ineffectual even if it was practical, since elementary MAC-address spoofing, well within the reach of your average script-kiddie, could implicate a latte-sipping teeny-bopper in child porn trafficking, were she unlucky enough to use her netbook while seated next to a tech-savvy pedophile at Starbucks. Nor will I exhort you to contact your elected representatives to express your outrage, because this will never become law. The politically muscular forces of the so-called “hospitality industry” will make a few phone calls, and the sponsoring congress-critters will issue a meek, “Never mind”, like this:


I will, however, issue my suggestion for a more appropriate acronym:

Saddling Technologists with Onerous Obligations Ostensibly Preventing Internet Deviance